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"The re-establishment of a parliamentary Science and Technology Committee was approved on Thursday. The committee will be made up of the same members as the existing Innovation, Universities, Skills, and Science Committee (IUSS)."
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"Under the arrangement, the companies said they will work together on chip design and open-source software. Intel recently has entered that field with its Linux-based operating system called Moblin, designed to function on portable devices, and Nokia has a Linux-based operating system, dubbed Maemo. In addition, Intel will license some modem technology from Nokia."
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BBC 'Click' makes some claims about what MIT is 'inventing': "MIT - is a breeding ground for boffins - the next generation of gadget creators. Ten thousand students, five schools and one college including the famed Media Lab make up MIT - which has an annual research budget of well over $500m (£302m). Every year hundreds of new inventions and patents are created at MIT and millions of dollars are earned in royalties from previous projects that have become public. So what's next?"
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China begins to ban 'gold farming': "Cash earned in games in China can no longer be spent on real world goods. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce policy aims to limit the impact of game currencies on real-world markets. In the future, any cash earned by Chinese gamers can only be spent to acquire items or equipment in that particular game."
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Urban Atmospheres/ CommonSense (a la Intel Berkeley) -style public sensing project, led by Imperial College: "Cyclists, buses, cars and even pedestrians will become mobile pollution detectors in an initiative launched on Tuesday. Led by Imperial College London, the project will trial three types of mobile, wireless pollution sensor. These will measure traffic pollutants throughout the UK, and transmit their data via the mobile phone network."
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Telecommuting gets 'mobilised' (again) for the noughties, the beeb reports: "Today work is somewhere you travel to - in the future work will come to you. So says a report attempting to work out what the offices and workplaces of 2030 will be like. It predicts that as workforces get more mobile, technology will ensure that everything an employee needs is available no matter where they are."
links for 2009-07-02
July 2nd, 2009links for 2009-06-13
June 13th, 2009-
"The Zoombak Universal A-GPS locator helps you stay connected to the things that matter the most by allowing you to actively locate what you are tracking in real-time and on-demand. It is a simple and ingenious way to keep track of items that need keeping track of - including children, bicycles, pets, backpacks and more!" Is there an equivalence between the list of those things?!
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"An intelligent, mobile-phone-based social network is being tested by researchers at Hewlett Packard. Friendlee analyses calls and messages to build up a picture of a person's closest correspondents." Bernardo Huberman is at it again, a quantitative algorithmic analysis is s'posed to give a reflection of your social life. An interesting experiment, possibly a disaster in personal privacy.
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Neat and simple visualisation of wirelessly communicable objects.
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Testing M$ 'natal', good review (with video) if a little gushing: "I haven't been quite this blown away by a tech demo in a long time. It looked neat onstage at Microsoft's keynote. Seeing it, feeling it in person, makes me want to believe that this what the future of gaming looks like—no buttons, no joysticks, no wands. The only thing left to get rid of is the screen, and even that'll happen soon enough."
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More ubicomp near-futurism: "One coming change in the cityscape that I’m expecting will be subtle, but pervasive: technology folks call it “ubiquitous computing.” The city will be alive with information, even more so than it is now. Every object—street signs, food carts, trains and busses, and especially people—will be digitally connected into an “internet of things.” It sounds Buck Rogers but in many ways it’s here already: Metrocards are connected to bank accounts, cell phones know where you are (and what’s nearby), signs on some subway platforms know when the next train is due to arrive."
links for 2009-06-09
June 9th, 2009-
Scientific spectac-ulation "To generate this list of contributors, I approached some of today's leading scientists and asked them to name some of the rising stars in their respective disciplines: those who, in their research, are tackling some of science's toughest questions and raising new ones. The list that resulted amounts to a representative who's who of the coming generation of scientists." Scientists have all the 'answers'…
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"Changing the model of pedagogy for this generation is crucial for the survival of the university. If students turn away from a traditional university education, this will erode the value of the credentials universities award, their position as centers of learning and research, and as campuses where young people get a change to "grow up.""
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Hmm. "“The technology will provide the location of the individual wearing the shoes within 30 feet, anywhere on the planet,” said Andrew Carle, an assistant professor at George Mason University who served as an advisor on the project."
Neologism ~ “spectaculation”
June 8th, 2009
I’m no fan of coining neologisms, but(!) I think I have a need for a word that pithily and succinctly allows me to cast mild derision at certain forms of speculation. It seems to be possible to carve out a career by publicising one’s work by stretching beyond the conventional limits of the remit of a particular project and making grand claims about ‘progress’. This is often identifiable by the monotonous use of phrases such as “in the future you/we will…”. Sometimes this is excusable, people get excitedly exuberant about their research and ideas (sometimes it’s done for you!), but other times it is clearly a deliberate tactic. Thus, I think we can describe what they’re up to as ’spectaculation’. For it is not idle speculation but taking a speculative claim and widening its application, making it sound more important and thus more news-worthy i.e. spectacular. So we arrive at spectaculation, and of course somebody else (probably lots of people actually) has thought of this already (in a slightly different sense): credit where it’s due.
Image credit: Flickr user ‘Unhindered by Talent’.
links for 2009-06-02
June 2nd, 2009-
Fun and jolly empire building with a smile: "You're invited to take the Day in the Cloud Challenge, the first-ever online scavenger hunt to be played simultaneously in the air and on the ground. We've teamed up with Virgin America to sponsor this challenge on June 24, 2009, the "Day in the Cloud." At Google, we've gathered a small group of gamers extraordinaire to come up with unique puzzles, trivia, and brain teasers, many of which use Google Apps"
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Mapumental is launched as "a realtime version of our lovely transport journey time maps … As well as being realtime generated, they include house price and 'scenicness' data, generated by the web game ScenicOrNot." The aim is to "take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners."
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"Housecoats and electronics are set to meet in a research project led by Northern Ireland academics. University of Ulster researchers are examining how hi-tech clothing could improve the lives of older people. The three-year project could see electronic devices built in to clothing that could provide information ranging from heart rate to bus timetables."
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Radio 1's very light-touch 'news' programme engages in some frothy envisioning at a 'house of the future' show: "When it comes to technology in the home if you've got the cash there's plenty of stuff out there - flat-screen, high def TVs, surround sound with MP3 docking stations, video game consoles galore - the list is endless. For a look at the very latest hi-tech gadgets Newsbeat went to see a "future house" at the Grand Designs Live exhibition in London's Excel Centre."
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BBC "Click Online" engages in some envisioning of near-future 'advances' in modes of interaction with a variety of devices. Lots of: "In the future you will…"
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"Quickly emerging from the fast-paced growth of mobile communications and wireless technologies, pervasive games provide a worldwide network of potential play spaces. Now games can be designed to be played in public spaces like streets, conferences, museums and other non-traditional game venues – and game designers need to understand the world as a medium—both its challenges and its advantages.
This book shows how to change the face of play—who plays, when and where they play and what that play means to all involved. The authors explore aspects of pervasive games that concern game designers: what makes these games compelling, what makes them possible today, how they are made and by whom. For theorists, it provides a solidtheoretical, philosophical and aesthetic grounding of their designs."
links for 2009-06-01
June 1st, 2009-
"Each month, we'll propose a scenario, and present some initial ideas and concepts. Then it's up you: Sketch out your vision, and upload your ideas (below). We'll use the best suggestions as inspiration for a future Found page, giving kudos to contributors. We'll add our favorite submission to this story."
Ubiquitous Computing video circa. 1991
May 28th, 2009“Coined by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s (PARC) Computer Science Laboratory (CSL), [Ubiquitous Computing] describes a vision of the future. Just as electric motors have disappeared into the background of everyday life, PARC scientists envision a future where mobile computational devices will be similarly transparent. Potentially numbering the 100s per person these devices are nothing like those you use today. They are mobile. They know their location, and they communicate with their environment.”
I have no idea if I’m allowed to put this up but it seems a desperate shame that this video isn’t held in one complete file, easily accessible to the public and to researchers, given the historical significance of the work conducted on ubicomp at PARC by Mark Weiser et al. during hte late 80s early 90s. Please see the original files here: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiMovies.html and read more about Mark Weiser by sticking his name in Google.
Please note that I had to edit out 2 minutes of the more technical stuff to get the video down to under 10mins.
del.icio.us vulnerability - hopefully solved!
May 27th, 200928.05.09 UPDATE: After a bit of tinkering under the hood I hope to have abated the nefarious spam jiggery-pokery. I also have a shiny new install of wordpress, which is really quite impressive! I’m not too sure how the nerdowells got in but hopefully I can keep them out now.
27.05.09: So, I just found that a bunch of links (for things I really don’t want to link to!) were being appended to the posts on this site that came through from del.icio.us in the last month or so. I may halt that bookmark sharing to here for a while, if anyone has had experience of this issue and got to the bottom of it please let me know. Thanks!
links for 2009-05-19
May 19th, 2009-
The Penn State 'Geospatial Revolution Project': "Geospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community."
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"Watch as Ian Sands, Director of Envisioning, steps through the video scene by scene and describes in greater depth the story behind the people and technology on display." Some interesting business-speak buzzwords used in this video, as well as an insight into the ways in which these videos are rationalised within Microsoft.
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"One startup, called Cloudkick, hopes to provide a simpler way to manage data stored across several different cloud-computing services. Cloudkick provides a unified, Web-based interface for monitoring data regardless of the cloud provider hosting it."
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"The world's most popular wireless smart card… the Mifare Classic, which is used in public-transit systems all over the world and to control access to many offices and buildings, has been the subject of intense scrutiny from security researchers. Last February, researchers from the University of Virginia cracked the encryption used to protect data on the card. Then, in August, a team from MIT showed how to get free rides on the MBTA transit system by exploiting weaknesses in the card. However, in both cases, physical access to the targeted card was required. Next week, at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, researchers from Radboud University will demonstrate a new, even easier way to steal data from the smart card. Their attack, which requires only a cheap, off-the-shelf card reader and an ordinary computer, can pull sensitive data out of a card in less than a second–even if the attacker has no physical access to the card."
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A well-funded project, which got EU money. From the blurb: "In the near future, every manufactured product – our clothes, money, appliances, the paint on our walls, the carpets on our floors, our cars, everything – will be embedded with intelligence, networks of tiny sensors and actuators, which some have termed "smart dust". The AmI world is not far off. We already have surveillance systems, biometrics, personal communicators, machine learning and more. AmI will provide personalised services – and know more about us – on a scale dwarfing anything hitherto available."
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Speculative blogging about 'AR' following MS 'future vision of…' and some recent apps for Android: "There are many potential scenarios for AR. A popular one is doing your grocery shopping and checking information on your mobile phone (or AR glasses!) about price, specials, reviews, comparisons with competing products, etc. With the rise of RFID chips and technology such as that being developed by Microsoft, this type of scenario isn't too far away… Another interesting consideration is that social software will have a big role to play in future AR apps. For example when walking down the street, you could use your mobile phone to point to a restaurant, and overlaid on a photo of the restaurant would be customer reviews, recommendations, and other relevant user generated data."
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Wikitude is described as "a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content." It allows users to overlay information from Wikipedia onto a photo of a certain location, via Mobile Google Maps, in an AR/HUD style.
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HP Labs' 'cloud print' is: "a web service that allows you to use your mobile device to print documents to any available printer, and all you need is an internet connection to do so. The service was developed by HP's IdeaLab, a part of the company's central R&D arm, which features emerging technology made available for public use"
Nonsense in the dark
May 18th, 2009Here amongst this darkened room
a fork could compose a tune,
an ice cream float parade for lunch,
a boxer collapse drunk on punch.
Playing across this inky pitch
teaming dreams compete for thought, which
hang in gloom on hooks of ideas
stimulating both hopes and fears.
And yet I sit alone, unmoving,
the blank of dark obscure but soothing.
Round about my thoughts are strewn,
here amongst this darkened room.
